Hi I'm Glyn and this space on the internet is where I share all things Photography and Post Production with the sole purpose of inspiring others to reach their full creative potential...thanks for stopping by.

Corporate Head Shots: Keeping it Simple

Thought I’d share a little behind the scenes to give you an idea of how I approached some recent corporate head shots.

In a previous post I showed you the 12 person group photo from corporate shoot with Eight Wealth Management; that was on day 2 of the 2 day shoot.

Day 1 however saw us on location at their offices in Hampshire photographing head shots.

Obviously being a working office environment there was much to consider; not least our foot print (space we took up) and also safety of those around us and preventing anyone from coming into contact with lights, stands and cables.

Eight Wealth Management have a wonderfully working environment where clearly both employees and clients are made to feel extremely comfortable. The area we were able to work in was a rest / waiting area which was fine size wise; certainly smaller than you would ideally want a studio space to be but this is one of the things I love about photography…the problem solving and making the very best out of what situation / location you find yourself in.

So, keeping it simple but also classic I opted for cross lighting and using my favourite of all modifiers the Elinchrom Rotalux 135cm Octa and ELC 1000. Brian and myself set up a simple dark grey / almost black background behind and we were good to go.

A few test shots before bringing in any of the clients showed that a little more light was needed on the background but due to space we couldn’t alter the position of the Octa for this set up so simply added another light (an ELC 1000 and 130x50cm Elinchrom Strip Box) to skip a little bit of light onto it.

Finally I also added in a California Sunbounce Reflector (Silver) on the opposite side to the Octa so as to add a little bit of fill to the shadows; not completely but just to lift them from being black.

As you can see from the photograph the footprint we took up was actually quite small which worked for everyone; allowed employees and clients to move around freely and enable me to get exactly the shots I was after. Win Win 🙂

Cheers,Glyn

ps>If you haven’t seen the video I recorded showing how to achieve cross lighting, you can check it out below:

Comments

A very useful and informative post Glyn. Were the office lights an issue at all, or did your camera settings negate the ambient light?
I’m pretty fired up over this BTS as I reckon, after all the tutorials and info you’ve shared, that I could achieve this myself.
Cheers mate, thanks for sharing.